Today, Cisco released the fourth annual update of its Global Cloud Index, or GCI (see media release). For most people who follow cloud-computing, it’s no real surprise to learn that global data center traffic will nearly triple over the next five years or that cloud traffic is expected to nearly quadruple. Examining the trends within the top-line forecast projections is where we begin to see what this growth means for service providers, businesses, and consumers (and how data center networking is being transformed).

For Service Providers and Data Center Operations:

GCI Highlight: The workload density (that is, workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 5.2 in 2013 and will grow to 7.5 by 2018. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.2 in 2013 and will grow to 2.5 by 2018.

The Benefit: An important factor in the rapid expansion of cloud computing is increasing data center virtualization, which provides services that are flexible, fast-to-deploy, and efficient. Virtualized data centers require fewer physical servers and offer great scalability than traditional data centers. This can ease capex and opex pressures (allowing for investment in other areas).

As we have been celebrating over the past weeks the Cisco UCS 5 year anniversary, here is another great example of an enthusiastic customer and partner .

Steria has been amongst the early adopters of Cisco UCS in 2009, as the IT organization was looking for innovative solutions.

5 years after the inception, Eric Fradet , CTO on Infrastructure Management, reflected on the achievements and shared at Cisco Live Milan how transformative for his IT organization this “bold” move was .
Thanks to the UCS deployment, Steria has been able to develop quickly cloud services, starting with the IaaS and PaaS offers, and moving now into the desktop-as-a-service with an offer called Workplace on Command.
Amongst the qualities brought to the market by the UCS concept, Eric Fradet was prompt to highlight the performances, the ease of deployment and the security .
And it was with great delight that a very satisfied customer wished a warm “bon anniversaire” to UCS!

Actually the story of Steria is quite remarkable as the offer evolved recently to embrace the desktop with the deployement of Cisco Prime Service Catalog [ Spoiler alert : Stay tuned for more good news around Cisco Prime Service Catalog – Check Phillip Han’s blog on this topic in the following days ]

Already one of the largest providers of IT-enabled business services in Europe, Steria is also becoming a global player with a growing presence in India, North Africa, and South East Asia. With proven consulting skills, and expertise in IT and business process outsourcing, the company decided that the time was right to extend its offer to the cloud with offers targeting enterprise users .Read More »

It’s been more than two years since we introduced the Cisco Cloud Partner Program and began putting partners at the center of Cisco’s cloud strategy. Now, we’re going wider and deeper with all of the ways Cisco helps you, our partners, win in the cloud era.

In the last two years, the cloud market has exploded and analyst projections are for continued growth in the future. Using Gartner research, we also understand that by 2015, half of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructure via the cloud, and that by 2016, global spending on public cloud services will grow to more than $200 billion.

There’s no question that the advent of cloud has changed the customer sales cycle. IT decision making power is increasingly moving into individual lines of business, whose managers are buying computing as an operating expense from cloud service providers or services resellers. Therefore, Cisco’s cloud strategy is to enable, versus compete with, our partners and customers – a major difference when you consider how other vendors restrict sales of cloud-enabled services to their direct sales teams. As a cloud enabler, Cisco helps customers build, deploy, and consume cloud services and at the same time, we stimulate demand for partners’ Cisco Powered cloud and managed services. Read More »

We are proud of our customers and their success in the marketplace. They are changing the way business is done by providing scalable, enterprise-grade, secure, and affordable cloud solutions. By tying together the Unified Data Center with the Cloud Intelligent Network and applying Applications and Services on top as end-to-end solutions, these cloud providers are delivering differentiated services with high-level SLAs necessary for end-users’ strategic applications. That’s what US Signal is doing for their customers.

But for some more background, last week at Structure, the conversations swirled around how to handle Big Data, the future of software-defined networking, data center compute technology, database and programming types, and open versus proprietary. Two of our CloudVerse customers, Terremark and SunGard both had strong booth presence and Terremark also had a packed presentation delivered by Jim Anthony, VP, Tier II Solution Architecture Team. Compared to last year, there was a stronger agreement that cloud providers are fully capable of providing public or virtual private cloud services with trust, scalability, and affordability, instead of companies taking on cloud internally by themselves. There are many needs for cloud services out there and that means there are opportunities to provide a differentiated service.

As such, with data usage increasing exponentially, it’s clear how important the network is for connecting the many clouds out there. Let me explain how US Signal is leveraging their expertise with an end-to-end delivery network to success in cloud. Read More »

You can’t turn around without seeing new stats on the growth of cloud adoption. (One of our favorites stats states that by the year 2015, 50% of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructures via the cloud.)

While growth is imminent, many customers are still wary and concerned about risk. To both help partners better prepare for growth and help address customer concerns, we launched the Cloud Partner Program with three tracks: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider, and Cloud Services Reseller.

On the heels of that news, Gartner released a report titled “Cloud Adoption at Risk without Big Channel Investment.” We’ve summarized a few of the key findings and recommendations for partners:

Through 2015, cloud service brokerage will represent the single largest revenue growth opportunity in cloud computing.

The channel has an opportunity to play a significant role in aggregation and brokerage services. The challenges facing enterprises building private cloud services or leveraging public clouds are significantly more complicated than just technology.

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